LD 4629 
.P3 
1838a 
Copy 1 



MR. M'DOWELL'S ADDRESS, 

PKINCETOnr, W. J. 1839. 



I 



ADDRESS 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



ALUMNI ASSOCIATION 



COLLEGE OF NEW JERSEY. 



SEPTEMBER 26, 1838. 



*'> 

.^r 



s*^*'"' 



BY JAMES M'DOWELL, ESa., 

OF ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY, VIRGINIA. 



K 



SECOND EDITION. 




"^1 



S PRINCETON: 

PFJiNTED AND PUBLISHED BY R. E. UORNOR. 
1§39. 









College of New Jersey, September 26U), 183^3. 
James M'Dowell, Esq. 

Sir— At a meeting of tiie Alumni Association, held this day, it was unani- 
mously resolved, "that the thanks of the Association be presented to James 
M'Dowell, Esq., for the very eloquent Address delivered by him this day; and 
that he be requested to furnish a copy for publication. 

In communicating the above resolution, allow us to add the expression of our 
earnest hope that you will add to the obligations under which we already lie to 
you, a compliance with the request of the Association. 
With the highest esteem and respect, 
Your obedient servants, 

SAMUEL R. HAMILTON, J 

ALBERT B. DOD, \ Committee. 

DAVID N. BOGART, \ 



Princeton. September 27th, 1833. 
Gentlemen — 

The address upon yesterday, for which, through you, I am now presented 
with the thanks of the Alumni Association is so much overpaid by this testimony 
of the kindness w'lih. which it was received, that I am only sorry you should 
have gone farther, and have requested me to lay it before anotlier tribunal at 
the expense, perhaps, of the discretion and the judgment of us both. Far 
better, as I am sure it would be, to commit it to the chronicle of kind recollec- 
tions than to the sterner and more enduring one of the press, it shall nevertheless, 
be placed in your hands for publication as soon as it can be prepared fov ihat 
purpose. In this, some unavoidable delay will occur, as well from the many 
liberties taken with the manuscript Address in the spoken one, as from some 
pressing out-door engagements which will occupy me for some days, but the 
least delay practicable will be permitted. 

With my warmest and most respectful acknowledgments to the Association, 
be pleased to accept individually, the expression of the sincere personal regard 
with which I am 

Your most obedient servant, 

JAMES M'DOWELL. 



ADDRESS. 

Mr. President, and Gentlemen of the Alumni Association. 

Another anniversary has brought us together to renew, 
over a common altar, the sympathies and pledges of brother- 
hood, and to derive from the teachings of the past the lessons 
and the duties of the future. We are again met as members 
of the same academic household, to tell over, with all its moral, 
the story of separation and of life ; to revive the embers of early, 
if not decaying friendships ; to foster by mutual indulgence, 
the grateful and glowing sentiment which here, at least, will 
always go forth in gratitude and in homage to the parent in- 
stitution which rocked the cradle of our intellect, and blessed 
our boyhood by its care. We are again grouped and gathered 
from amidst the throngs and thoroughfares of the world into the 
family circle, to join our hearts and hands in the presence, and 
in prayer for the weal of its cherished and venerated head, and 
to carry hence, into all the differences which destiny or which 
opinion may establish amongst us, that healing and kindly in- 
fluence which flows from the cultivated sense of kindred and 
common obligation. The sons of this institution would be less 
than men if, quitting their habitations and their business, and 
assembling year after year upon this hallowed ground of their 
pastime and study, they could enter anew into the forgotten 
engrossments of their youth, and could have the faded memory 
of that animated and ambitious but joyous period, with all 
its train of companionships and day-dreams and hopes, brought 
back again and pressed upon the heart in full and gushing 
stream, and yet could turn from it all without entertaining for 
each other one kindlier emotion than before, or pouring out one 
warmer benediction upon the sanctuary that had sheltered and 
had reared them. The spirit, like the body, so depends upon 
the things of the present — so requires the daily ministration of 
its daily bread — that if its connexion with the past by frequent 
aids from the senses be taken away, its affections are taken also; 



and are yielded up, with little reservation, to the engrossments 
of the passing hour. The past must be involved in all the 
movements and purposes, or it is practically lost — it drops away 
into distance and into shadow, and though the poetry of its 
hoary image may remain, the effective power of it is gone. It 
is the constant presence and reciprocity of benefits and depend- 
ance which constitute the general law of man's gratitude and 
attachment. Take an alumnus from under this law— the pre- 
sent and immediate sense of obligation and benefit — turn him 
from a student into a man of the world, engage him in its 
schemes, lay him open for years together to the multiplying 
importunities of business and care, and he will afterwards feel, 
when his sensibilities are recalled to this nursery of his mind, 
by some such occasion as the present, that its many claims had 
waned upon his memory — that his heart had drifted away from 
it far out to sea, but still, that its hold upon his affections, 
though shaken and weakened, had never been destroyed. This 
hold it is a wise and benevolent purpose of your association to 
strengthen and to continue. To this end you lay your hand 
upon that of time, and check him in his waste before check is 
unavaihng : you contest with him his right to the unlimited 
rule and ravage of the past, and you wring one of the dearest 
and most cherished portions of it from his grasp, by blending 
it here in annual and inspiring exhibition with the purposes of 
the present. You bring to this spot the graduate of another 
day, gather his friends and companions into his arms, surround 
him with associations and with scenes which embody the pic- 
tured story of his youth, with all its laugh and all its tears, and 
thus you revive the pulse which the tramp of the world had 
deadened, and thus you take from the heart the long grass 
which long years had gathered upon it. You do more than 
this — more than revive upon the graduate the sense of colle- 
giate obligation ; you collect the numerous and the scattered 
progeny of this institution of every age at a common rendez- 
vous, and circulate amongst them the warm blood of family 
relationship. The elder son, who has spent his day as a mis- 
sionary of letters, and is retiring from the field of his labours to 
the repose of age, is met and grouped upon this spot with a 
younger brother who is just girding for the contest, just going 



forth as a reaper of the harvest of life ; and whilst they stand 
together at the side of the benefactor of both, entertaining the 
same sentiment of allegiance and of gratitude, every thing that 
makes them strangers to each other vanishes away, and the 
claims of a felt and kindred connexion immediately spring up 
between them. 

By this means you establish an exterior and unrelaxing in- 
terest in favor of this college, which habitually operates, to 
sustain its prosperity, upon the wide and willing contributions 
of the country. When this convocation of its friends, warmed 
and animated by the impressions and incidents of this day, 
shall have been dissolved, and its members have gone back to 
the places from whence they had come, their homes will be so 
many separate rostra from which the claims and cause of the 
college will be pleaded with invigorated zeal, and pushed on- 
ward Avith fresher energy into broader and closer contact with 
the sympathies of the public* Fast and far as its value shall 
be proclaimed and felt and believed by the public, its founda- 
tions will be strengthened and its boundaries enlarged. Dedi- 
cated as it is to the great interests of mental preparation and 
power — to that cause which liberates the mind and equips its 
energies for all that is best in speculation and best in action-— 
and long and amply as the pledge and purpose of this dedica- 
tion has been redeemed before the face of the world, it may 
now command, is now entitled to command, from a benefited 
and confiding people, a help which shall be wide and sure and 
permanent as its own memorials of worth. Grant it a support 
in the degree of its desert— mete to it in the abundance of that 
measure wherewith it has meted unto others— and no destiny 
could be nobler. Sharing with others in the struggles and 
achievements of science, this institution maintains no arrogant 
pretence to exclusive renown or exclusive support. But where, 
it may be respectfully asked of all the confederates who have 
joined her in the career of letters, where is there one, — yeaj one— 
that has laboured with a truer or a better arm through the toil 
of the field, or poured out a flood of richer irrigation upon the 
intellect of the land ? Poor in every thing but her merit ; pow- 
erless in every thing but her faculties for service, these simple 
elements have been to her the fabled alchymy of philosophers 



8 

by which she has turned every thin^ into gold ; she has 
wrought out of them both endowment and wealth — transmu- 
ting her very poverty into a power which is enriching herself 
with new abilities and her country with new benefactions. 
Never forfeiting by delinquencies the pupil which her fame has 
attracted, she is yearly adding to the thousands who rise up at 
the mention of her name, through every portion of the land, to 
render her their homage, and to " call her blessed." Look back 
upon the lapse of a hundred years, see the kindred institutions 
which have faltered or failed at every step of that lengthened 
line, then turn your eye upon your own, and you see her al- 
ways at her moorings ; always on her arms ; always fighting 
with the first and foremost in the holy cause for which she has 
enlisted ; never yielding her objects to a blanched and timid 
spirit, but pressing them onward with a bold one ; gathering 
her trophies from her trials, her courage from her exertions; 
standing forth, at every point of that time, a cheering example 
to the weak and to the strong of her associates ; the white 
plume, indeed, of the great Henry of France, which soared in 
the battle when others fell, and led when others failed, and 
never led but to duty, to triumph, and to honour. 

Gratified especially as an alumnus will ever feel at deriving 
his academic obligations from an institution so beneficently dis- 
tinguished as this, the patriot every where exults with him 
over the results it has already accomplished, and over the prog- 
nostics which shadow forth an honourable and useful future. 
To whatever limit the success of the college can be extended, 
it is in every possible expansion, the proper subject of every 
man's rejoicing. Its success is that of education ; the success 
of that cause through which reason, rehgion, liberty and law 
are to be maintained : the cause of rational, thinking, immortal 
man, over gross, perishable and animal man ; the cause of 
social and governed man, with his civilization advanced to the 
uttermost under the dominion of intelligence, or impaired to the 
uttermost under the abusive rule of rude and ignorant power. 
Adversary in relative effect, as institutions of learning may 
sometimes be upon the progress of each other, yet being aux- 
iharies for a common and a noble end, the spirit which would 
surround them with jealousy, and thereby narrow as to any, 



or all of them, the measure of their popularity and effect, is a 
Vandal spirit which counterworks, as far as it goes, the great 
agent of human improvement, and restores the reign of barbar- 
ism and of night. It matters nothing to the world by what 
tongue the principles of duty be proclaimed, nor by what hand 
the seeds of knowledge be sown. Wherever a prejudice has 
been conquered, there an obstacle has been removed from the 
path of improvement ; wherever a truth has been maintained, 
there a post has been taken and fortified in the progress of the 
mind. All that education with all of its agencies combined 
has ever yet been able to accomplish, has been to retrieve from 
waste a portion only of our intellectual domain ; to cover over 
with verdure and with fruit but a spot here and there of the 
universal mind ; whilst ignorance, like a great Zahara, stretches 
around even these with a fearful readiness, if not a power, 
to desolate them all by its desert and its drifting sands. And 
sustained and encouraged as education may be with every aid 
and appliance that may be had, it can never attain to perfect 
triumph over that " lust of the flesh and lust of the eye and pride 
of life" — that anti-trinity of the world which it has every where 
to meet and encounter as its enemy. But partial as its triumphs 
may be, it is still our great agent for breaking up the total usur- 
pation of the appetites ; for infusing a broader and deeper ac- 
tion of intelligence and virtue into the various enterprise of 
life ; for freshening up, more and more in the etherial and im- 
mortal spirit, that burning light, that impress of divinity within 
it, which animalism and earth have ever been in constant and 
in horrid league to darken and destroy. 

Independent and self-sustained as is the reputation of this 
college, and safely as it reposes upon the annals of the past and 
upon the very general and very signal success of its sons, still 
it is grateful, as an obscure one of these, to come to its side 
with a public testimony to its merit ; grateful to say, that whilst 
no dishonouring restraint was ever laid upon the action of its 
pupils, and no deceptive expedient ever practised to rob them 
of their time for the convenience of their teachers, that every 
thing, whether of discipline or instruction, was so ordered and 
enforced as to imbue them, as far as external agencies could 
imbue them, with sound knowledge, sound habits, and sound 
2 



10 

principles of public and private duty. Especially gratifying is 
it to say, that however frequently in professed discourses for 
that purpose, the great truths of religion, with their solemn 
sanctions, and their legitimate claim to the regulation of life, 
were set forth and maintained ; that however earnestly the 
union of fiety and learning was inculcated as constituting the 
noblest result of human instruction, and as bringing into combi- 
nation the purest elements of rectitude and power, yet that no 
system of particular theology was ever commended to their 
adoption, no sectarism ever attempted to be fastened on their 
conscience. The irreversible claims of heaven were avowed — 
often and boldly avowed — but the mode of acknowledgment 
and submission was left to the heart and the judgment of the hear- 
er. The spirit of party and proselytism was never here, but the 
provident and parental spirit which contemplated the thinking 
and undying portion of our nature, as having an interest in 
another condition of being, not to be forgotten or neglected in the 
preparations of this, was never absent : it pleaded for no creed, it 
enlisted for no school, it laboured for no sect, but it taught, it 
warned, it entreated, it pointed to the destinies of the coming 
day, and invoking the Father of all for the good of all, it trust- 
ed its bread to the waters, and cast out its plank for the rescue 
of the guilty and the drowning. 

Were your anniversary to accomplish no more than the re- 
union of old friendships and the extension of new, it would 
accomplish in this way something to render the life happier 
and better. You cannot associate men as you do the alumni, 
with all the memories of the past brought down in gathered 
and affecting impression upon them, without carrying through 
all their moral emotions a decisive and elevating influence, 
you place them where the selfish principle, for a season, gives 
way ; where they are drawn aside, insensibly, from the too 
separate and too entire concentration of the mind upon their 
peculiar interests and enjoyments; where a genial and a 
healthy atmosphere from without is breathed through the nar- 
rowest and sickliest cells of the heart. Surrounded whilst here 
with all that can awaken their sensibilities, or deepen upon 
them the truths of social duty and dependance, they go back 
with their patriotism and their benevolence refreshed, and 



11 

retire for the future into a wider circle of companionship and 
kindness, and a narrower one of prejudice, selfishness and aver- 
sion. Their country becomes dearer to them than before, be- 
cause identified with an augmenting amount of personal attach- 
ments and an augmenting interest in her great systems of pub- 
He amehoration, and they, in turn, become dearer to their coun- 
try, because of that very multiplication of motives which con- 
federate them more indissolubly than ever with her efforts 
and pledge them with increased responsibilities to her cause. 

But there is another effect attaching to this anniversary 
which is distinct, important, and not partaken of by any other 
public assemblage. No where but here can the man, who has 
gone out upon the career of life from the instructions of 
this place, ever have his heart so sternly or so inexorably chal- 
lenged to stand forth and to render up its honest account of 
that purest of all trusts — the trust of educated talent— which 
the college has bestowed upon him. Lei the challenge be met 
with such brow and such courage as it may, itsnaked justice will 
tell upon the conscience, and its imperious demands will ex- 
tort from that equitable judge a hearing and an answer. The 
noble trust, itself a faculty, with all of its conventional distinc- 
tion, all of its vast unlimited power of command over the trans- 
actions and treasures of mind, and through these, over all the 
objects and systems of human enterprise and interest, has been 
committed to his hands ; how profitably or how vainly, with 
what miserable or what ample avail for its magnifi.cent uses, 
it is now for him, if never before, to feel and to acknowledge. 
Never does the responsibility of this confided faculty come 
over conscience with such ascendant and overawing control, 
as when he brings it back, after the interval and employment of 
years, and stands with it in the presence, the public presence, 
of the benefactor who gave it. Never does the call to self-ex- 
amination and to trial for the full and faithful application of it, 
sweep over him with such a felt and subduing authority as 
then, nor ever does the heart, thrown loose at once from all its 
subterfuge and stratagem and pride, rise up so involuntarily or 
so honestly to respond and to confess. It may not shrink, it 
may not shudder, it may not weep over the poor and the scanty 
mprnorials on which its suffrage upon itself is to rest ; but 



12 

he whose heart can exult, can triumph in its testimonies, can 
claim the perfect peace which perfect fidelity only can inspire, 
may hail himself as privileged and as blessed beyond the scope 
and the allotment of his fellows. 

It is but yesterday — so vivid is the remembrance of that vivid 
hour that intervening years melt into moments— that all this 
gay and gladdening pageantry was for us ; but yesterday that 
we stood upon this very spot as buoyant and as sanguine as the 
younger brotherhood around us, as eager and as armed as they 
for the encounter of life ; cheered and guided onward, like 
themselves, to all its purposes and perils by benedictions and 
by counsels ; and whilst the honoured guerdon of our youthful 
ambition — the spur and the belt of college knighthood — was 
publicly conferred, we too were adjured to receive it as pledging 
us before man and heaven to an unflinching career of fidelity 
and of service to both. Our going forth upon the labours of 
life was such as we have to-day : the greeting multitude, the 
fervid hope, the flattering augury, the promise and prediction 
of cultivated talent was all ours, and ours too the parent's and 
the patriot's prayer that for every faculty conferred upon us 
here, measure for measure should elsewhere be rendered to 
God and to our country. Such was our departure : what our 
return ? Have we returned faithful in the administration of 
the fiduciary fund which was committed to our charge, or 
faithless and recreant, distinguished most, or distinguished only 
by the vestiges of the summers' suns that have burned upon 
us ? Do we return rewarded and graced with memorials of 
achievement ; with our pathway strewn over by the traces of 
the good we have done ; with our hearts rejoiced, like those of 
wise and watchful husbandmen, at the rich and ripening fruits 
of our approaching autumn ? Or come we hither with nothing 
but the sear and yellow leaf that tells of barrenness and decline? 
Only look at our thin and mutilated number, and see how 
fearfully " the breaker has gone up amongst them ;" how many 
there are of those, who partook as deeply as ourselves of the 
animation of that day, who have been taken from the tribunals 
and the trials of earth, and have passed to accountabilities 
where faith only can follow them ! But whilst we lament as 
to these that the whole of life is extinguished, have we no 



13 



reason to mourn over a part of our own as no less irrecoverably 
gone? Have we buried no years nor months of healthful and 
vigorous manhood, and that with a bereavement the bitterer 
and the more afflicting as no circumstance may survive to 
soften and hallow them to our memory? Some of you may 
have rightfully put forth your faculties in the very spirit for 
which they were given, and have benefited and bettered man 
by that holy property of knowledge which associates the public 
good in a constant union with every just and strenuous exer- 
cise of its cultivated power. Some of you there are who will, 
doubtless, be remembered, and be had in reverence by the world, 
who, in your various vocations, have plucked a pain from the 
body, a sorrow from the spirit ; have guided the wayward with 
counsel, the wandering with hght, or have stepped forth m 
some seasonable or exigent hour of your country's fortunes to 
brace and to build up, with a scholar's and a patriot's power, 
her edifice of freedom. But are there no others whose stew- 
ardship of education is a record only of upbraiding and sor- 
row and shame ? No others who have shrunk with unmanly 
weakness from the fulfilment of its trusts, or with guilty and 
traitorous spirit have profaned them to purposes of evil ! Are 
there none who have carried this noble power of instructed 
mind into a haughty and enervating and useless retirement, or 
who have thrown it away as a vain and glittering bauble, 
although it is that to which the guardianship of man is com- 
mitted, that which elevates him above the clod of the valley, 
and approaches him almost to an angel's station? Are there 
none of you over whom friendship and justice have often cried 
out in lamentation as in reproach, "why hest thou upon thy 
face ; get thee, oh, get thee up ?" If, haply, there be none who 
mingles in this array as the blasted mingles with the wholesome 
ear ; none who returns to this spot with even his solitary talent 
wrapped and folded up in the napkin in which he received it ; 
none who comes with all his powers lopped away, shorn and 
sorrowing from the hands of some fatal Delilah ; no judge 
upon this side the grave will so rejoice as that judge in the 
heart who sits and tries for all of us to-day the issues of the 
past. If there be, let him go hence and return again resolved 
to answer in repentance and in pain no more. Yea, let us all 



14 

profit of the consciousness and the teachings of this hour ; let 
us go back to the field of our unfinished labours with a bolder 
and better spirit, there to redeem to the uttermost our obliga- 
tions to man and to heaven, and so to blend the triads of this 
life with the eternal issues of the next, that when our mortal 
agony shall come, it may find us in peace, our dying hour be 
disburdened of remorse, and our spirits, as we bow to the tomb, 
greeted with angel voice, calling to us from within and from 
above, " child of God, ascend to heaven." 

Let it not be supposed by our younger friends, the under 
graduates of this institution, that our sympathies are so ex- 
hausted upon ourselves that we have no portion of them to 
spare for them and their condition. This can never be, as no 
situation can ever arouse a more commanding or a tenderer 
interest than yours. It is a situation most honoured for the 
honoured cause it involves, the public hopes it embodies ; dear 
to every one who knows its trials and who sympathises with 
the manly and the self-denying virtues it demands. Believe 
me, that a wide and watchful interest, comprehending every 
father and mother of the land, would be directed to your situ- 
ation here, were it viewed apart from all intellectual results 
and regarded only as exhibiting upon a prominent theatre that 
most perilous of all moral contests, where a body of youth, 
thrown loose from a parent's observation and a parent's coun- 
sel, are left in the hot and riot season of the blood, with no 
other arms than their virtue, to contend and to grapple with 
temptation, fighting with his hundred hands, in one of the 
chosen seats (forbidden though it be) of his revel and his 
power. But there is another interest entertained in your be- 
half which is distinct from this, though no other can ever be 
higher or more generally felt. You are regarded as a part of 
that favoured and distinguished few who are to constitute 
hereafter the life-guard of letters ; to whom the lofty destiny 
is appointed of going the foremost in the march, directing and 
enlightening all others in the pathway and purposes of knowl-. 
edge, as the convoy ship which gives pilotage and protection to 
the feebler vessels that follow in its wake. In this relation it 
is that the eye, the hope, the heart of the community, are upon 
you, and upon you with such intensity of observation and of 



15 

wish as might well arouse, were it necessary, your own sense 
of duty and achievement. Your acquisitions, and your re- 
joicings on account of them, are in truth the acquisitions and 
rejoicings of the pubhc, that pubhc too which will feel for your 
failures, should any unhappily arise, some portion of that hu- 
miliation and disappointment, whose heavier and bitterer part 
will be reserved to wound and crush the feelings of those, the 
most revered and loved of yourselves, who, of all others upon 
earth, have the holiest claims upon you to be saved and shel- 
tered from such sorrow. Distinguished, therefore, by elevated 
and peculiar responsibilities as is your situation here, you will 
bear, I trust, with a suggestion or two, however obvious they 
may be, as to the means of securing its advantages the most 
permanently and surely. 

As one of these means, let it be urged upon you never to 
regard your college education as a mere embellishment of the 
mind, but always as an active and reproducing power of il ; 
never as a merely graceful accompaniment, qualifying you to 
enter with ease and zest into the elegant gratifications of genius 
and taste, but as a new or supplemental faculty, so wrought 
into the texture and substance of all the other faculties, as to 
strengthen and harden them all for increased usefulness and 
increased exertion. There is so frequent a tendency to the 
merely ornamental in college education, and a tendency which 
is oftentimes so disguised as to be neither suspected nor felt, 
that the most habitual vigilance is scarcely sufficient to detect 
or arrest it. Whenever the mind is unwilling to enter into 
communion or into action with its own thoughts ; whenever it 
becomes impossible without pain and constraint upon it to 
abstract it from its prescribed subjects of exercise and study, 
and engage it, however briefly, in the laborious exercise of its 
own powers ; whenever it relapses from this exercise wearied 
or disgusted with the task, and recurs to it with increasing and 
still increasing reluctance ; whenever this is the case, be as- 
sured either that your education (which is, substantially, the 
faculty of the mind to control itself) has not been begun, or 
that the symptoms of a diseased one are upon you ; that the 
process of unsuspected enervation is going on, and that you 
are in danger of permitting the chosen means for invigorating 



16 

the mind to be so perverted as to fasten indolence, weak- 
ness and dependance upon your own. Mistake not for 
education that excitement or animation of mind which the 
exercise of your literary taste may produce. No such light 
and transitory impulse to mental pleasure or reflection 
can any more supply the place of those severe and painful 
exercises of analysis and induction, by which only the mind is 
trained to a full developement and control of its powers, than 
the spasmodic excitement of exhilarating gas can supply the 
healthier and homelier fare that nourishes the springs of ani- 
mal life. The higher, indeed, the strength and the capacity 
for labour and action into which the mind can be educated, the 
better does the state of it consist with the graces and gratifica- 
tions of the lighter tastes, just as the strongest columns give 
surer support to the parasite plants that hang and wreath them- 
selves in ornament upon them. But admirable as may be 
those lighter tastes when found in fellowship with the strong- 
est powers, as the twin products of the same cultivation, they 
are comparatively valueless, if not worse, when found by them- 
selves : they may still in some sort embellish, but it is as the 
hectic flush which brightens on the cheek of disease, and which 
only beautifies, for a moment, the fatal ruin it reveals. Betray 
not yourselves into the folly of pursuing the embellishments 
of education separate from its utilities, nor fill your minds with 
the vain and misguiding phantasy of a lettered and dignified 
repose ; but fill them with manly purposes of energy and ex- 
ertion, and labour to bring them, by every means within your 
reach, into the solid and hardy texture which shall fit them for 
exposure to all weathers, and for the wear and tear, the rug- 
ged work of all employments. Look to your education at all 
times in its double aspect of a poiver and a trust, a power pro- 
videntially placed in your hands, but in trust for the good of 
others as for yourselves, that thus you may have an early and 
habitual and adequate appreciation of its obligations and its 
worth! Only settle it, in your own judgment, upon this just 
and comprehensive basis, and its responsibilities will be en- 
forced upon you by the calls of a double duty; its delinquen- 
cies forbidden as involving the crime and curse of a double 
treason, a treason to yourselves and to society. Cast from you, 



17 

then, the besotted yet besetting folly of making it only the 
dreamy companion of the closet, the elegant and honoured 
guest of the drawing-room, and seize upon it as the great 
mstrument which is appointed of heaven to the hardest and 
the noblest service, the improvement and subjugation of the 
world ; the only one which elevates where it conquers; which 
achieves its victories without blood, and gathers in its trophies 
from land to land amid the shout of human blessings, and 
without the stain of a human tear. 

Let it be urged upon you, as a cardinal maxim in mental 
education, always to study and to labour for results ; never to 
be satisfied upon any subject submitted to your examination, 
until you shall have followed it up and thought it out to its 
simplest elements. Only establish this analytical habit of 
reducing all subjects to their constituent parts, and of thus 
estimating them in their simple as well as compounded form, 
and you will be speedily rewarded with rapid perception, w^ith 
sound judgment, Vv^ith ripe and vigorous powers of investigation 
and of reasoning. No other habit makes the mind so rich, so 
ready, so practical, nor does any other conduct its operations 
with such entire fidelity, or challenge for its decisions so safe 
and habitual a confidence. Science itself, as you well know, is 
but a collection of final truths, a body of established results : 
the more nearly then we bring our current subjects of investi- 
gation and interest, where the nature of them will admit, to 
like results by like methods, the better will we understand 
them, and the more closely shall we approximate the whole 
volume of our knowledge to the certainties and the value of 
demonstrated truth. But let this habit of mind be neglected 
and left unestablished, and indecision, inaccuracy and confu- 
sion of thought inevitably follow ; the ideas become little better 
than the spectral groupings of the camera obscura, shadovv^y, 
dim, fantastic, disproportioned, and the whole mind for every 
purpose of prompt and judicious action, above all, for every 
purpose of energetic practical action, is made weaker and 
poorer by its unavailable accumulations of power and v/ealth. 
It is needless to say that this habit comes only of much and 
wearisome labour, and that to expect it, or expect any thing- 
else that is valuable in life to be otherwise derived, is the folly 
3 



18 

of the dotard and the child, the mirage of the credulous and 
dreaming skiggard, and as fatal in its illusion, though far more 
voluntary, than that of the desert, which mocks the fainting 
traveller to disappointment and to death by the sight and sound 
of ideal waters. If in relation to this or to other objects of 
attainment which make up your purposes and duties here, you 
pause and doubt and stretch forth a feeble and hesitating hand, 
and approach your labours with sinking heart or averted eye, 
be assured that you palter with yourselves, that you covenant 
with impotence and shame and disappointment, that you plun- 
der your country of its rightful expectations, and throw from 
your own possession a far more legitimate power over the 
treasures of this world as well as of the next, than ever was 
symbolled to catholic faith by the key or the crown of St. 
Peter. Labour is the inexorable and unchanging law under 
which every faculty must be brought if you would rise above 
the ignominy of helpless and dishonoured life ; but inexorable 
as it is, if it rules you with a tyrant's power, it blesses you with 
a parent's benefactions. It has been decreed against man, as 
his eternal doom, that he should live only by the "sweat of his 
brow ;" against the serpent, that it should crawl " and eat of 
the dust of the earth all of the days of its life." Choose ye, 
therefore, between the alternatives ordained by providence 
itself: work, as it is the doom of man to do, and take with it 
all the prerogatives and glories of man ; work not, as is the 
doom of the serpent, and take, with this imagined indulgence, 
the crawling, trampled and loathed condition of your reptile 
enemy. 

Suggestions connected with your avocations and duties so 
crowd upon the mind, that whilst it would be improper to en- 
large, it is difficult to retrench. You have all read the story 
of the royal Attila breaking with his hungry and brutal horde 
over the defences of imperial Rome, trampHng her refinements 
and institutions in the dust, and extinguishing the last and the 
pale light which still shone from the capitol for the guidance 
and renovation of man. You have read it, and have burned 
with impatient and indignant anger at the rapacious and the 
conquering savage, but did you feel how inexpressibly baser 
than he, was the degraded and the sunken Roman, who quailed 



19 

and shrunk and stooped to the blow which ravaged and 
ruined his country? It was a noble trophy to the pride of the 
brave but ruthless Goth to smite so illustrious an enemy to the 
earth, and to brandish his gleaming sword in shouts of triumph 
over the " eternal city," as the hero and the master of its fate. 
The darker and deeper infamy of the tragedy must ever rest 
upon the degenerate Roman, who lifted up as he was above all 
others by freedom and letters, yet recked not of their inspira- 
tion, but crouched, cowered and sunk in his own consecrated 
temples of liberty and war, and wore the brand and bandage 
of a slave amongst the monuments and in the presence of his 
glory. Take the Attila of the story as the striking and pic- 
tured representative of that ignorant and savage spirit which 
wars against the attainments and the institutions of learning ; 
the impotent and degraded Roman, as the recreant son of edu- 
cation, who meets the fury and the waste of his ruffian antago- 
nist by a craven, heartless and futile resistance. Whenever, 
then, you look upon the region of letters and of thought, and 
mourn over the invasions of ignorance within it, turn your 
wrath upon the traitor sentinel who abandons the posts and 
preparations of defence. Be faithful, therefore, to your trust, 
and never share in the reproach of having betrayed the city 
or the temple whose lights you have enjoyed, and for whose 
protection and defence you are set. So act as man and scholar, 
that you may come up from these halls of learning and these 
years of temptation, without a want to your usefulness or a 
wound upon your name, with powers which need nothing but 
a theatre for service, and a character which, like the rock at 
Megara, whereupon the lyre of Apollo was laid, shall send forth 
its notes of sweetness and melody from whatever side it be 
touched. 

To you who have just received the ceremonial seal, which 
closes your connexion with the college, and which accredits 
you with honourable testimony to the world, this hour, glad as 
it is in the exulting sense of independence which it inspires, is 
the beginninof one of more anxious and solemn consequence 
than any other that has opened upon you. It is an hour which 
advances you to undertakings and duties which, whether con- 
sidered in reference to mind or character, outmeasure by far, 



20 

ill coiTaplicatioQ and importance, any other to which you have 
yet been called. The gown, with all the responsibilities and 
obligations of manhood, is taken to-day. The rubicon of youth 
is passed, and is now behind you: the battleof life stands ready 
before. The qniet harbour, where you have been ministered 
to for years in gentleness and peace, is now quit, and you are 
launched upon the wave of the wide sea, where your pilotage 
and success must be such as lieaven and your own good heart 
shall supply. At this moment, which is always one of rejoicing, 
follow what may, when the restraints of impatient pupilage are 
taken away, and the heart leaps forward to busy life as to a 
revel and a feast ; at this moment to read you over the lessons 
of a grey and care-worn experience is, in some sort you may 
think, to exhibit anew the mystic hands and the mystic words 
upon the wall, the skeleton finger and the boding motto, calling 
up only images of gloom unseasonably to dim the ruby of your 
cup, unkindly to check the joy of your banquet. Rather 
imagine that as you are no Belshazzars to tremble at prophetic 
revealings, and I no sage or seer to announce them, that some 
words not of gloom, but of soberness and truth, may even now 
be spoken v\^hich may benefit and aid you when this festal hour 
shall have gone. So presuming, let it be said, that if you 
would acquire firmness, elevation and weight of character at 
the very outset in life, if you would impart to the mind the 
whole of that consistency and vigor of which it is susceptible, 
and would crown all these virtues by reputation and by profit, 
then choose at once the profession or pursuit -to which you 
intend to be attached, and embody all your energies in prepara- 
tion for it. Choose candidly, upon thorough examination of 
yourself, but choose promptly. Decline to do so, loiter away a 
year or two of the most precious period of your lives in the 
vain and voluntary self-delusion that you are wisely exercising 
your judgment with observation and reading and facts, that 
you may decide at last with the better discretion ; do this, as 
thousands have done to their sorrow, and not only will the 
tone and courage of your mind abate, and all of its faculties 
gradually give way under the abandonment of its accustomed 
discipline, but innumerable conjectures of hypothetical evil 
will fill it; and visionary reasons for further and further delay 



21 

will spring up in afflicting abundance on every side of you, to 
postpone and perplex your decision. Every moment not im- 
peratively demanded by the necessitiesof self examination and 
an intelligent survey of the general operations of society, every 
one beyond this, which is spent under the deceptive pretence of 
deliberation and inquiry, only aggravates your perplexity and 
distress, and will ultimately fasten upon your mind the distem- 
pered and incurable habit of halting and indecision. You 
may search and search and be no more profited withal than 
the inquiring and eccentric hermit who roamed through the 
world, looking in all its paths with a candle in his hand for an 
honest man, but retired at last, v/earied, disappointed and dis- 
heartened to his cell, where, as the fable reads, he renounced 
his hopes, extinguished his torch, and died in despair. Let all 
waywardness and caprice be dismissed from your choice, and 
your plan of life be definitely settled, and it is amazing to see 
how instantaneous is that firmness and energy which result to 
the mind from this single act of concentrating its purposes and 
powers. But delay and delay, and as no system of life is adopt- 
ed, or adopted in tim.e, your self-control, your sense of personal 
value, your efficiency and your promptitude of decision are all 
lost : your struggles to live, to act, to play your part in society 
as might become you, insensibly but inevitably dwindle down 
into a petty and contemptible shuffle of daily expedients ; and 
repentance, mortification, disappointment, to say nothing of 
positive and resulting vices, oftentimxcs follow after to bring up 
in mournful array the procession of Kfe. 

The idea of a gentlemanly acquaintance, as it is called, 
with all subjects of liberal knov\rledge, without committal to the 
supposed drudgery of pursuing any one of them professionally 
or laboriously, is native to the region of a college, and is in 
truth, one of those dangerous hallucinations v/hich oftentimes 
haunt, with more than the power or the mischief of sorcery, the 
minds of sprighth/ and speculative young men. The reign of 
it, however, would be short and comparatively harmless, were it 
not occasionally favored by those external circumstances of 
weSlth which the youthful possessor so often and so ruinously 
interprets into a full discharge from all the labours of life, and 
into a title-deed to all of its blessings and enjoyments. Let all 



22 

such especially beware of the fascinations and tendencies of 
this delusive idea : let them spurn it away as a counsellor and 
emissary of evil, as a false and profligate adviser, who would 
persuade them, with demon logic, to convert their means and 
faculties for service into motives and instruments for useless- 
ness and sloth. Never permit property, though it should pour 
in upon you in constant and unebbing stream, to decoy you by 
its soft persuasives from the hardy and practical uses of edu- 
cation ; but make it the rather give weight and power to that 
education, just as the grosser metal which forms the body of 
the woodsman's axe, is made by him to give weight and power 
to the finer steel which is fitted on the edge. If inherited 
wealth takes you from the labours of the field, and education 
does not equip you for those of the mind, you are lost, in both, 
to the productive uses of society, and you abuse, through both, 
the highest faculties for service which its institutions can se- 
cure. Be your circumstances what they may, forget not that 
that life is most acceptable to God, which being first most sub- 
missive to Him, is after that, most useful to man. 

Out of the representative structure of our government, and, 
out of that perfect dependance upon the capabilities of the 
general mind which it requires, there arises to every American 
citizen — above all — to every educated one, the imperative duty 
of combining, with his preparations for private life, some prepa- 
ration at least, for those public trusts to which in some form, it 
is both his right and obligation to contribute. No view or es- 
timate of duty to an educated citizen could be poorer or hum- 
bler or more wretchedly mistaken in the latitude or compre- 
hensiveness of its objects, than that which does not place what 
he owes to his country side by side with that which he owes 
to himself. And this view, which is the true one, ac- 
quires a yet loftier and more inspiring character, when that 
country itself is regarded as discharging a duty not limited to 
its own citizens, but experimental in its results upon the inter- 
ests of the world ; as in the very midst of a problem auspicious 
in its prosecution thus far to the hopes of deceived, oppressed, 
misgoverned man — a problem, whose great issue is destined to 
prove, whether that government which is the freest isjiot at 
the same time, the strongest and the best for all the purposes 



23 

of regulated freedom; whether the largest possible amount 
of national happiness and power is not always built up on the 
largest amount of civil and individual liberty. Whilst every 
freeman amongst us, being a unit of the government, is pledged 
to the issue of a problem so affecting, by its immeasurable re- 
sults, the expectations and the destinies of millions, upon you 
nevertheless, and upon others of kindred condition, who have 
partaken the most deeply of the benefits of the government, and 
will, doubtless, share the most largely in its representative 
functions, devolves more justly and eminently than upon all 
beside, the burden and the responsibihty of its success. From 
whom else could such aid so properly and so efficiently come? 
The help required is that which statesmen can render the best, 
and where, but to our public institutions of learning, as so many 
nurseries for that purpose, are our statesmen to be looked for? 
those who are such in all the worth and glory of the title, 
whether their wisdom sheds its light only in the daily offices 
and intercourse of men, or whether it be appropriated by their 
countrymen, and thus be made to brighten, to guide, and to 
bless in the senate. It is to these institutions we look, nor have 
we looked in vain. They have often given us their supplies, 
have given us men who are amongst the honoured and vene- 
rated of the world ; who have aided to fix the landmarks of 
mind for the age, and have earned, by their genius and their 
services, an undying record in a nation's heart. You are to 
follow — you too are to come up to the help of your country, 
and when you do come, the hope and the prayer of all is, that it 
may be with the enlightened head and the bold heart, and the 
consecrating patriotism which, combining to place you amongst 
the foremost in capacity, shall place you, also, amongst the 
foremost in usefulness and honour. Without hereditary office, 
or entailed inheritance, or any other of those artificial arrange- 
ments which throw a government upon distinct classes of so- 
ciety, either by positive appointment or by necessary effect, 
without any of these but independently of them all, our govern- 
ment stands where it pleases heaven that man himself should 
stand, upon the simple and natural footing of intelligence and 
virtue. Mind, cultivated and virtuous mind, is the only foun- 
tain of legitimacy to the government or of rank to the citizen. 



24 

A Persian Caliph pointed to his scymetar and his soldiers as 
the true and proper arbiters of disputed succession : this, said 
he, is my pedigree, and these its supporters and its proofs. 
America, with a more heaven-directed spirit, points to the 
morals and the mind of her sons— both regulated and both en- 
lightened — as the only sure and equitable ground work of 
public or private authority. And it is in you that these quali- 
ties are expected to be found, upon you, in part, that your 
country depends for their possession and their exercise. Nour- 
ish your understandings, therefore, for the duties that are before 
you, and when you enter upon them, forget not that they are 
pubhc duties, that as such they are never to be confounded 
with personal objects nor profaned to the unholy end of pam- 
pering a vain, selfish, or profligate ambition. Public offices are 
trusts, pure trusts ; conferred in faith for the general weal, and 
opposed throughout the whole range of their intendments, to 
all the purposes of individual advantage. To pursue them, 
therefore, as being in any respect whatsoever the proper sub- 
jects of traffic or private emolument — to clutch at and seize 
upon and apply them as the just acquisition of personal booty, 
is in reality to perpetrate a robbery ; a robbery more wicked 
and worse than that which classic fable has punished with the 
naked rock and the gnawing vulture ; nay, it is to commit 
simony against the state, only less criminal and less accursed 
in itself than that simony against heaven, which would have 
purchased its gifts and its powers to dishonour, defile and de- 
stroy them. 

In this connexion with the subject of public trusts it is not 
inopportune to add, that as all of them, however varied iheir 
relations, depend at last upon the application, in some form or 
other, of the popular sovereignty of our government, so there- 
fore as a just inference from the proposition, you should never 
entertain a derisive or contemptuous opinion of the aggregate 
popular understanding. This understanding is at one and the 
same moment, the inceptive and the corrective power of the 
government, so that to impeach it habitually by a sneering and 
scoffing under-estimate of its value, is, in fact, habitually to 
weaken and waste the vital energy of the government itself, 
with that of all the interests and institutions it upholds. But a 



25 

low estimate of that understanding is not only a malum pro- 
hibitum, as being contradictory of the positive principle of the 
government, it is a malum per se — not only a wrong, because 
subversive of the very foundations on which we stand, but a 
wrong in fact, a false opinion, the more mischievous because 
often inhering, like a flaw in the diamond, in the minds of 
educated men. It is, as you well know, upon the higher or 
lower estimate of the popular understanding, as upon a gradu- 
ated scale, that we have had, in all ages, many of those varie- 
ties of liberty and restriction which distinguish the different 
governments of the world — from the republic, where the whole 
body of civil freedom is entrusted to collective man as its only 
safe and natural depository, up through every modification of 
artificial restraint, to that perfect despotism which invests its 
custody in the robber sovereign, who has plundered and 
wrenched it from the people. In the midst of your own free- 
dom, cheering and vivifying to us all as the sun in his bright- 
ness, beware lest you cherish opinions rninous of the principles 
which secure it, and congruous only with the fundamental 
and fatal doctrines — the unrighteous and impious dogmas of 
those governments which restrain and destroy it. Whatever 
the inlet amongst educated men of an undervaluing opinion 
of the popular mind ; whether to be found in the. habitual and 
exclusive study for years of no other than the highest models 
of the human intellect, and in the contempt thus insensibly and 
gradually developed for every marked degree of inferior capa- 
city or cultivation ; whether to be found in this or some other 
source, it is an error — a gross and pernicious error, as a free 
intermixture with the great mass of our general population 
will abundantly demonstrate. Go to this mass, you will not 
see the refinements of education, the rich and deep alluvion 
which it has poured out upon the college mind, but you will 
see a clear sighted and vigorous and over-mastering common 
sense, imperfectly aided indeed, but still awakened into gene- 
ral and powerful activity, not only sustaining at this moment 
the government and all its institutions, bat sustaining, and di- 
recting also a diversity, a complication, and a magnitude of 
private business, which is wholly unequalled amongst equal 
numbers of any other people upon earth. Go and strip the 
4 



26 

coarse and the homely covering from off the general mind of 
our countrymen, as the South American hunter, by accident, 
stripped from the mountain side the shrub, which showed, un- 
der the concealment of its roots, whole quarries of gold, and 
though yon may meet not, as he did, with the glittering ore 
which purchased for ages nothing but impotence and sorrow 
and bonds for the country of its native home, yet you will 
meet with an iron intellect— an intellect of that ruggeder and 
better metal which, wherever it be found, whether in the 
heads or the hands of a people, alike protects them against 
poverty and against power. Let therefore every prejudiced 
conception of the popular capacity, should you entertain any, 
be cast from you at once and forever as doubly unjust, unjust 
to your countrymen, unjust to yourselves — as resting upon a 
wrong in judgment^ — ending in a wrong in results, contributing 
to destroy all sympathy between you, and at last perfecting its 
injustice and its injury by driving you, it may be, with what- 
ever fitness you may have, from the public service of your 
country. The very beginning of such a prejudice too, should 
be received with the greater distrust, as it is one of the melan- 
choly facts of history that learned men, as a body, have never 
been distinguished amongst the Hampden s, and the Henrys, 
and the Sydneys of mankind : yea, a melancholy truth, that 
comparatively common men, acting upon the inextinguishable 
principles and feelings of nature, have conquered and main- 
tained the rights which the sage and the scholar, actins: upon 
the abstractions of the closet, have discountenanced or de- 
nounced as pernicious or forbidden. 

In the party struggles which are incident, of necessity, to 
the organization of our political system, the safety-valve of the 
system itself, and that which has hitherto been relied upon with 
success, is placed in the firmness, intelligence and unpurchase- 
able honesty of our general population. In every contest then 
to wh,ich your duty or your feelings may commit you, resolve, 
at all hazards, to remain honest both to yourselves and to your 
country, and so imbue your minds with the inexpressible value 
of this one patriot quality, in sustaining the great ends of your 
government, and stripping party of all that is pernicious in its 
power, that when you are put upon that most painful and most 



27 

generous exercise of it to which you can be put — the sacrifice, 
namely, of your party ties for conscience and for country's 
sake — you may find it easy to your disciplined and determined 
virtue. Party of itself is no necessary evil, and let those who 
look upon it in this light, and who bewail the wrangles and the 
jealousies and the ignoble acts by which it is oftentimes distin- 
guished, let them remember that they but lament over other 
forms of common and inherited frailty. In its worst shape, it 
has never yet been more than ''the rust of our system," which 
free action has always brushed away. And despite of all the 
phantasms and the dogmas upon this subject, which closet 
philosophy or political scepticism may engender and proclaim 
to affright or to teach us, who will dare to say that the purest 
aristocracies and the noblest privileged classes which man has 
ever seen, were not more completely the slaves of selfish influ- 
ences and passions, having nothing in common with the public 
good, than the most degenerate and untutored populace they 
ever despised or oppressed ? It has pleased heaven, in its wis- 
dom, to commit to every man his eternal interests, as being the 
safest and best depository of them, for himself: and if there is 
one lesson which reason and history, properly consulted, teach 
more emphatically than another, it is the one analogous to this, if 
indeed it be ,not a part of it, that man too is the best depository 
of his temporal rights — that these are always safest when held 
and guarded by himself. In no age, however blind or corrupt 
it be, have we one solitary instance of a whole people wilfully 
undoing themselves. But how many and by how horrible ex- 
pedients of punishment and perjury and wrong, have been 
wilfully and cruelly ruined and undone by their riilers ! 

The party excesses which now and then have distinguished 
our poUtical contests, have thus far broken and exploded upon 
our system, only as the meteoric lights which glare and terrify 
for a moment, and then break and explode upon the earth, 
without jostling or impeding in the least its onward and its 
massive movement. 

There are one or two views of duty arising from the influ- 
ence and efiect, both domestic and exterior, of the federative 
principle of our system, which, though familiar perhaps to you 
all, are yet important and may well be urged upon your earnest 



28 

regards. Look at this system in all of its extent, and you will 
see that every analysis to which it can be subjected will prove 
that no other one is more difficult to be abused to violent ends, 
or, when abused, more easily restored to sound and to whole- 
some action — incapable therefore of tyranny, and when en- 
trusted to its own provisions, easily capable of self-adjustment. 
Nay, farther, a fall analysis will show that no other system can 
do so much as it can, if administered upon its established 
principles, to advance the purposes of knowledge and civiliza- 
tion, because no other combines such a multitude of separate 
centres, each one of which, within itself, gives increased activity 
to every thing, thereby adding to the power of all human 
movements, and each one affording, in times of trial or distress, 
a refuge and a shelter from the errors and misfortunes of all 
the rest. But these general results are deduced, not exclusively 
indeed, but mainly from the postulate that the federal bond is 
secure. Here in this bond — in the concentration or the hos- 
tility of power it involves — we have both the strength and the 
weakness of our system. This is, therefore, precisely the con- 
trolling and the vital point, which the patriotism and the wis- 
dom of all are most required to cherish and defend. If we 
judge from the general principles of national intercourse and 
action, or from the ordinary, well understood, and unchange- 
able passions of the human heart, no other within the whole 
range of political events is more probable, if not more demonstra- 
ble, than this, that whensoever the federal union be dissolved, 
be it by consent or by violence, and the several states which 
compose it be re-arranged into smaller confederacies, or formed 
into separate and integral commonwealths, the present peaceful 
and happy relations amongst them will be progressively, per- 
haps immediately, changed into relations of jealousy, enmity, 
altercation, and war. Look at their immense inequalities of 
geographical advantage and of physical power ; at the danger- 
ous and tempting vicinity of the weak to the strong; at their 
long lines of border connexion, with the innumerable provoca- 
tives and facilities to every species of trespass, and of jurisdic- 
tional evasion and complaint, which these must always afford : 
look at the lakes and the bays and the rivers intervening 
amongst them, the noble bonds of peace because of interest 



29 

and prosperity now, but then the never-faihn^ sources of quar» 
relj because of contested rights and privileges of navigation — 
above all, look at the radical and disaffecting differences which 
inhere in their respective habits and texture of society, and you 
have in all these a mass of elements which, however providen- 
tially and beneficently harmonized under our federal head, 
could generate nothing else, amongst separate states, than 
jealousy, repugnance, irritation and bloodshed. Whenever 
border aggression, or any other of the thousand causes of war 
which national folly or wrong is ever at hand to supply, shall 
bring up actual hostilities between these separated states, then 
the evil hour of them all has come, and their after fortunes will 
be little else than variations of struggle, of agony and woe. 
Let war be threatened or felt, and all of its muniments, its 
levies of money and men, its garrisons and armies and navies 
will have to be provided, and provided the more lavishly in our 
case, from the proximity of the parties and their vast accessi- 
bilities to mutal and to vital attack. This demand for military 
means, thus heightened by the extraordinary exposure of the 
parties, must conduct sooner or later, as under less evident ne- 
cessity it has conducted every where else, to that readiest and 
fatallest of all expedients to supply it — the expedient of a 
standing army — which itself can never be resorted to in our 
case, without requiring the organization of a new and more 
powerful, if not absolute executive to create and command it. 
With wars and standing armies and supreme executives, what 
of national liberty would we have left to live or to hope for? 
Only separate from one another, and you will march upon one 
another ; you will fight and struggle until your struggle reaches 
the point of national existence, and then your strong founda- 
tions of freedom will be overthrown ; the hmuations and the 
safeguards which guarantee it now will be giv^en up as a last 
and mournful sacrifice for safety ; state after state will sink 
under the ruffian rule of the camp, until some American Maxi- 
min or American Alexander, conquering all, shall again con- 
solidate all, and shall stamp his heel into that throbbing heart 
which beats and burns, at the present hour, with so pure a sense 
of human liberty, and glows with so rich a hope of renovating 
the people and the governments of the world. 



30 

But the range and the horrors of this catastrophe do not 
terminate with ourselves ; they comprehend the interests and 
the hopes, if not the fate, of other milhons than our own, and 
thus involve them, in eminent degree, in the preservation of 
that beneficent bond which only can prevent it. It is a part 
of the praise and the strength and the glory of our country, 
that her hands have impelled the progress, and her institu- 
tions sustained all that is pure in the free principles, 
of popular revolution. If you would measure the dignity of 
the demands of this national position, look abroad at the on- 
ward and overwhelming movement of the free or popular 
principle of government ; see it portending at this very mo- 
ment, not the vast extension merely, but peradventure the en- 
tire empire of democracy. Philosophy herself, as she calmly 
reads, upon the horoscope of nations, the shadowy presages of 
their fate, no longer recoils and disowns this ultimate result as 
the dream of enthusiasm. Her wisest followers begin to assume 
and to avouch it as inevitable — begin to see and to believe, as. 
progressive events hasten to their issue, and bring into open 
view the parent causes from which they descend, that the revo- 
lutionary movement of the day, in behalf of the popular prin- 
ciple, is no new and no startling phenomenon in politics, but, 
in truth, is a part of the most ancient and uniform and perma- 
nent tendency of any which history exhibits — a sort of provi- 
dential decree, universal, enduring, baffling all the efforts of 
man to check or to limit its control. No where, however, has 
this popular principle, now advancing to its just supremacy, 
ever received either full development or peaceable development 
but here, and no where either do the hopes or expectations of 
others upon this subject, turn with eagerness or with confidence 
but to us. Thus doubly connected, by illustration and by 
sympathy, with the progress of this great principle, our coun- 
try, as a consequence, stands as a parent at the head of it, and 
at the head of all its revolutions ; responsible as a parent for 
the wisdom and the prudence which may yet be wanting to 
the full and the redeeming glories of its perfect triumph. It is 
for us, who are so proudly stationed, and who too were gath- 
ered in our infancy from every people, to build up and main- 
tain amongst ourselves an impregnable stronghold from which 



31 

streams of religion and freedom and knowledge shall flow 
back again, to fertilize and to gladden the regions from which 
our fathers and our blessings came. It is for us to see that the 
banner of onr republic shall wave over an undivided empire — • 
an empire as unparalleled in its extent as in the wisdom and 
the justice and the humanity of its institutions. Excelling all 
others in regulated liberty as our country does, so too let it ex- 
cel all others in holy efforts to perpetuate the felicity which it 
was raised up of Heaven to exemplifyj and to hallow, through 
all time, the principles it has rendered immortal. The nations 
who follow in our steps, whose confidence and dependance rest 
upon us as their great example, call upon us to beware — to be 
true as bold. The poor and broken-hearted and down-trodden 
man, as he looks up from under the despotism which veils him 
in with its covering of cloud, pours forth his prayer to the 
Father of all, as he weeps for himself, that ours may be the 
radiant and the steady course which shall never bewilder or 
betray. And so, join him in his prayer that it shall be. Let 
the millions of the wretched and the oppressed of all lands still 
look with certainty to us for guidance and rehef ; still stretch 
out their hands unto us as they stand upon their shores, and 
hail our country as the life-boat of liberty to the world— 
as the little ark which is destined of heaven, in this latter 
day, to bear, for the renewal of man, the choicest of its 
treasures through all the dangers of tempest and of deluge. 
And yet a scroll— a prophet's scroll of lamentations and tears 
and woe, may proclaim to the world that we too are fallen and 
gone. But smitten, crushed, crumbled into atoms though we 
may be, yet now, now, thank God we can never, never die. 
We may sink as others have sunk, overwhelmed by that relent- 
less and dread succession which sweeps whole nations to the 
grave ; the young and the bold heart of this republic, proudly 
as it rejoices in the beauty of its heritage, and the promise of 
its days, may pass away with all perishable things, but our 
name, our example, our mind, our spirit, will live forever to 
enlighten, improve, and bless the world. The spirit of our 
laws, let superstition and ignorance and power do what they 
list to destroy it, will abide upon the earth as the redeeming 
spirit of after timeSj and shall pass from hand to hand, like the 



32 

iiiextin2:uishable fire of the Grecian temples, till all the nations 
be filled with its brightness. 

Yet immortal as it shall be, let us be instructed by the mo- 
nitory voice that comes to us from all the records of all the 
past — from every age and every land; and comes to tell us, 
that lost republics are lost forever ; that though their spirit 
never dies to others, it never revives, when lost, to regenerate 
themselves. Look at the tiger and the reptile as they have 
dwelt for ages in the habitations of the Holy City ; look at des- 
potism, worse than either, as it has nestled and brooded with 
its raven wing upon the very bosom of buried republics, and 
be warned of that mysterious doom — that evident ordination 
from on high, which connects, in eternal fellowship, the privil- 
eges with the punishments of nations, which never allots the 
highest blessings but side by side with the heaviest woes. Be 
warned by this fated conjunction to put away all passion and 
parricide from amongst us — to gather and press to the side of 
your country — to heal the chafings and the wounds of her 
spirit by the fervour and the unity of yours — to sacrifice and 
to suffer when need be, that she may neither sorrow nor perish ; 
and if there be a curse in all the land, let it abide for the over- 
whelming of him who cometh not up to succour, to defend, 
and to save. Yes, for the overwhelming of him and such as 
him, for where, under providence, but upon the heart — the 
constant and devoted heart — where but upon the patriotism 
and the virtue of her sons is the country to rely against the 
corruption of her own mighty elements of good into mighty 
engines of evil. I call upon you then, as you would clinir to 
that country, and would bear her onward in her great career, 
that you cherish these sacred principles, the very life-blood of 
her peace as well as of her faculties and her hopes. Such and 
so fervent be your devotion to her welfare as that which glow- 
ed in the heart of the younger Pitt, and of our own Adams, 
who, in the midst of their agonies, forgot not the countries 
they had lived for, but mingled with the spasms and the sor- 
rows of the dying hour, a last and imploring appeal to the 
Parent of mercies, that he would remember, in eternal bless- 
ings, the land of their birth. Such be your devotion as that of 
the young enthusiast of Paris, who, listening to Mirabeau, in 



33 

one of his noble vindications of human rights, and seeing him 
fall from his stand, dying, as the physician proclaimed, for 
want of blood, rushed to the spot, bared his arm for the lancet, 
and cried again and again with impassioned utterance, " take 
it — oh, take it from me — let me die, so that Mirabeau and the 
liberties of my country may not perish." 

I shall be pardoned, I trust, by this audience, already taxed 
too long, for introducing, in connexion with this view of a 
patriot's duty, and as an appropriate appendage to it, a closing 
remark upon an all-engrossing and all-pervading subject, which 
deeply, intensely, and sternly invoh^es it — a subject which, 
though it takes hold more immediately and more totally of the 
peculiar interests and structure of southern population, yet, in 
its final issues, intervv^eaves itself indissolubly with the peace 
and the hopes and the destinies of us all. If it is ever import- 
ant to consider it with admonitory reference to its inevitable 
and its dread results, it is at this moment, above all others the 
most important, whilst the public mind is ruminating upon it, 
and before any violent or any irrevocable act has thrust it out 
from the forum of reason, to be discussed and decided upon 
the field of battle. It is now, if ever, when a threatening 
frown scowls and lowers upon its front, that evidence should 
be heard, lest an unv.'ary judgment should let loose the sword 
to " slay the man that is thy fellov/." Who here that asks— - 
who here that needs to be told that abolition is the subject 
meant ; that subject of monster omen, though perchance of 
pious birth — which fostered and forwarded with a v/ild and 
explosive energy, has been made to tower above every interest 
of party, and above every measure of policy, by putting into 
contest the very body and being of the state. Passing by the 
questions of theology and morals and constitutional power and 
private right which have been embodied with this subject, I 
have this only to say which my southern position, and, there- 
fore, my keener apprehension, both as witness and victim of 
all its results, will enable me to say — that if it be pushed on- 
ward by those who are locally foreign to its interests and its 
dangers, until it becomes the efficient and admitted cause of 
some insurgent ebullition, it will be the parent, not only of 
unutterable calamities to us^ but of certain, irretrievable and 
5 



34 

bloody undoing to themselves and to all. Let those amongst 
you who choose, bewail the existence of slavery as a majlstrom 
in the bosom of southern society, if they but touch it with prag- 
matical, with forbidden and infatuated hand, they render it a 
m6elstrom to engulph the Union. Be adjured, therefore, by the 
weal of this and coming ages ; by our own and our childrens' 
good — by all that we have and all that we hope for in the glo- 
ries of our land, to leave this subject of slavery, with every 
accountability it may impose, every remedy it may require, 
every accumulation of difficulty or of pressure it may reach — 
leave it all to the interest and the wisdom and the conscience 
of those upon whom the providence of God and the constitu- 
tion of your country have cast it. Leave it to them now and 
forever^ and stop, before stop is impossible, the furious head- 
way of that destructive and mad philanthropy which is light- 
ing up for the nation itself the fires of the stake, which is 
rushing on, stride after stride, to a strife and a woe that may 
bury us all under a harder and wickeder slavery than any it 
would extinguish. Nothing but bitterness — nothing but ag- 
gravation of heart and of lot has been brought upon that un- 
fortunate man whom rash and pernicious attempts — the prompt- 
ings of this blinded and baleful spirit — have been put forth to 
benefit. They have broken down the footing he had reached, 
crushed the sympathies he had won, embarrassed and accursed 
the fortunes they were interposed to control. The generous 
and elevating influence of our free institutions was relaxing 
his bondage, bettering his condition, lifting up his character, 
turning upon him the public anxieties and the pubHc councils 
as a great object of provident and public provision — was chang- 
ing at all points the aspects of his fate, when a spirit, sent of 
heaven as it insanely imagined, came from abroad, to scourge 
him with demon visitation ; to wrench him from the arms of 
his only true and only capable benefactors — to throw him back 
again upon the earth a thousand fold more suspected and more 
separated than before ; rivetting upon him every fetter it would 
loosen — poisoning every blessing it would bestow, and filling 
his whole case with elements of hopelessness, explosion and 
evil, which the heart sorrows whilst it shudders to think upon. 
Why, then, persist ? Why abet the growth or the daring or 



35' 

the power of a spirit which wisdom and mercy plead to you 
with all their tongues, to silence and to stop? Will any 
daughter in this assembly, the cherished and defended of a 
parent's love, blessed to the uttermost with the holy peace of 
perfect security — sheltered to the uttermost from the apprehen- 
sion and the approach of every wrong, with no enemy to 
dread-— no hand to injure — no terror to affright — safe in her 
repose, safe in her innocence at every hour and in every place 
— will she do that, which, all-valueless for its objects, will yet 
be all-powerful to send wakefulness and watching and danger 
and anguish, perchance, to the days and the nights — to the 
summer shade as well as to the barred and bolted chamber of 
her southern sister ? Will any mother here, as she soothes her 
infant to its rest, and looks upon its balmy sleep, and pressing 
it to her heart, bows in gratitude to God for his mercies to her 
child — thanking him that its life is safe — safe from harm — 
from the hand of violence and revenge, and that all its slum- 
bers are guarded by a nation's power — will, she — oh, can she, 
as the consequence of her acts, bear to behold the southern 
mother startling and shuddering, at every foot fall, and at every 
noise which breaks upon the silence of the night, and flying 
from her pillow of wakefulness and wretchedness to kneel and 
crouch upon the cradle, weeping and sobbing in the agony of 
her soul over the murder and the horror that surround it ? 
Will the father and the citizen hail us and greet us and press 
us to their bosom, as better brethren and better men, when we 
shall come up with our hands all red and reeking with the 
blood they have made us shed? But if not, then abjure the 
cause which involves the crime, and the disciples who support 
it. Friends of the slave ! they are stripping him of the wretched 
remnant of liberty he has left. Friends of humanity ! they are 
cruelly and recklessly staking it upon means of massacre and 
convulsion. Friends of the country ! they are rapidly becoming 
its iron homicides — cleaving down its institutions with mur- 
derous hand, and tearing it limb from limb. If you would see 
the practical working of the spirit that is spoken of — the woe 
and the ruin it can occasion, go to the quiet and the passive 
slave of the south, pour your insurrectionary sentiments into 
liis ear, parade the worst of his condition in artful and in pic- 



36 

tured horror before his eye, then trace the progress of the poi- 
son — trace it through his murmurs, his resentment, his resist- 
ance; his passions growing deeper and darker at every step, 
under the disciphne he provokes, until anger and ulceration 
and agony of spirit have done their work, and revenge and 
murder have become the companions of his bosom : then see 
him leagued and banded with others as fell and as furious as 
himself, the vulture ai his heart, the dao'ger and the torch in 
his hand, stealing into the silent and midnight chamber, and 
standing, with horrid and uplifted weapon, over the parent and 
the child as they slumber for the blow, see him — let the shriek, 
the gasping struggle, the gory blade, the blazing dwelling, tell 
out the deed that is done. For one moment — one palsied mo- 
ment — a shivering and convulsive horror seizes upon the heart 
of millions of our people— in the next, a dreadful wrath drives 
on to a dreadful retribution. But if the blood of our people is 
ever thus to stream in our dwellings, and ooze from the very 
bosom of the soil that feeds us, it will cry from the ground like 
that of Abel for vengeance, vengeance against the brother hand 
that shed it, and vengeance would be had, though every drop 
that was left rhould be poured out in one anguished and dying 
effort to obtain it. Nothing — no nothing but heaven could 
prevent a people, so lashed up to frenzy by rage and suffering 
and wrong, from pouring back, upon the fields and firesides of 
the guilty, that visitation of calamity and death which had 
been sent to desolate their own. Spare us — oh, spare us the 
curse of a ruptured brotherhood, of a ruined, ruined country. 
Give up your happy and united country ; give it up to the 
madness of some factious hour, to the frenzy of some fanatic 
spirit; let it sink overwhelmed in some horrible struggle of 
brother Vv^ith brother, and you will recover its liberties and its 
blessings again, when the sun shall '-slumber in the cloud, 
forgetful of the voice of the morning^' 

" When earth's cities have no sound nor tread, 
And ships are driflirig with the dead, 
To shores where ail is dumb." 

Here upon your northern fields it was, at some dark and 
dismaying period of our revolution, v/hen army after a^my had 
been lost, when wretched and dispirited and beaten, the boldest 



37 

quailed, the faithfnllest despaired, and all, for an instant, seem- 
ed to be conquered except the unconquerable will of our glo- 
rious chief: — here it was, that risino" above all the ausfuries 
and the terrors around him, he exclaimed to the despairing of 
his followers as if inspired of Heaven for his work, "strip me 
of the wretched and the suffering remnant of my soldiers — 
take from me all I have left — leave me but a standard — orive 
me but the means of planting it upon the mountains of West 
Augusta, and I will yet draw around me the m.en who will lift 
up their bleeding country from the dust and set her free." 
That "West Augusta" stands here to-day pleading through 
me, who am a son, for the individual and unbroken heritage 
of Washington and his comrades. Loyal to the result as to 
the struggle of the revolution — devoted, as when her devotion 
was counted upon as equivalent to fate — true, as when you 
were grasped and bound to the bosom of each other in the 
hour of distress, it is her hope and her wish to finish with you 
the destinies of the nation— arm in arm to share with you in 
a common glory, and perish, when perish she must, only upon 
a common field : — thus testifying, through all time, to a fidelity 
which there was nothing in life that could shock, and nothing 
in death that could destroy. Turning her eye and her heart 
upon no other banner than the proud one Avhich floats from 
the capitol of the republic, she prays as she looks upon it with 
its "stars and stripes," that the glad shout which centuries 
hence may hail it in the land of the Pilgrims, may be echoed 
back from the waves of the Pacific Seas. Heaven grant that 
generations and ages hence, some future son of the south, 
honoured and welcomed and greeted as I have been to-day, 
may stand upon this consecrated spot, praising'and thanking 
God, as I do, that he also can say, these are my brethren^ and 
this, this too is my country. 



^1 



